Is there a god of evil?
Should we adopt a humanist, Zoroastrian, Judeo-Christian, Islamic, Hindi, Buddhist, or some other explanation for evil’s obvious presence among us? Who has the explanation?
And why should I ask you that question? Is there a trigger, an incident behind the question? Yes, in Pinellas County, Florida, someone hacked into the water supplier’s computer and tried to inject lye into the water at 100 times the recommended proportion. To what end? Certainly, it wasn’t for Good. Undeniably it was for Evil. There’s no relativism here, no situation ethics that can justify poisoning thousands. At least not in the mind of a so-called normal and rational person.
What motivates someone to attempt mass killing? Who poisons indiscriminately? “Nothing new,” you say, “it was a practice long ago when people contaminated wells of their conquered enemies. And remember the reason that all bottles and packages have not only those seals, but also warnings that if the seals are broken, the user should not use the product? That stemmed from the Tylenol cyanide poisoning incident of 1982.”
Thousands of years of contemplating the nature of evil have not produced a satisfactory answer. William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, a novel on the reading list in many high schools, suggests that evil, or savagery, is inherent. It’s built into the human framework. Jane Goodall’s discovery of chimps attacking neighboring chimps suggests the inherent evil is inherited. Religions everywhere seek an answer. The Book of Job places evil’s origin in The Adversary, the Satan, making it external to humanity. But seeking an external source has never been an explanation that satisfies. Even in the biblical tale, Job gets only an evasive answer: “Were you there when I created the Leviathan?” What’s the implication? What can Job or any of us infer from that answer? That the presence of evil is beyond our comprehension?
Did the Roman god Vulcan unleash pyroclastic flows down the slopes of Vesuvius in 79 AD? Do Zeus and Thor throw lightning at golfers idly standing under a tree during a storm? Is evil imposed from without as retribution for some previous offense, possibly an act that is in its own nature a perpetrated evil? If the answer is affirmative, then the implication is punishment, but no apology, no mea culpa, sets things right. Job lost his wealth and kids. Eurydice stays in Hades. If there had been deaths in Pinellas County as there were in the Tylenol tampering, no one could return the dead to the living. The mark of evil is most often a permanent tattoo, a tombstone at the worst and a psychological scar at the least.
But when I ask myself about the motivation for an attempted mass killing of Pinellas County’s residents, I must also ask whether or not I accept the bombing of London, Pearl Harbor, Dresden, or Hiroshima as justifiable mass killings. Was evil not at work? Were the innocent Londoners, sailors, Dresden or Hiroshima residents deserving of indiscriminate or targeted bombing? Isn’t it foolish to ask whether or not they deserved what they received? What had they done on a scale equal to total annihilation? What did Job do? What did the people of Pinellas County do that motivated someone to attempt killing them? Do I answer by saying war on the many is a justifiable revenge for evil perpetrated by a few power-hungry leaders?
The hacker who sought to poison the water was probably some disgruntled person who lost his Pinellas County or Clearwater city job, right? Clearwater?
No one, even the primary suspect, has been convicted of the Tylenol cyanide poisonings though that suspect was imprisoned for extortion. But whom do we hold accountable for the mass bombings of WWII? Truman? Isn’t the argument that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved millions of casualties for the price of a few hundred thousand deaths? Didn’t the bombing of Dresden shorten the war in Europe? Was it just a matter of a backward technology? There were no smart bombs to limit collateral damage. What choice did the Allies have in dealing with an evil leader and his willing followers? You bomb London; we bomb Dresden. It’s that mutual destruction idea by which we still operate.
Would I have done any differently if I had been President instead of Truman? Would you? Neither of us would indiscriminately poison a county’s water supply, we say, so we’re not evil; neither of us is a medium through which evil passes to others. “But, Pearl Harbor and the Rape of Nanking? You were asking for it, Japan; you were asking for it, Hiroshima,” we might have said.
Brilliant and one-time rakish Augustine of Hippo was a follower of Zarathustra early on, but then as a converted Christian and Neoplatonist, he reasoned that he couldn’t accept the principle of a god of evil AND a god of good, basically, because he believed in an Infinite God and could not accept that there could be two infinite beings, one good and the other evil. Yet, he appears to have accepted the existence of The Adversary in what I would call the Jobian sense, that is, an Evil One who spreads evil with the permission of God. But that just runs us round the circle. Why would a “good” God allow evil? The typical answer is twofold: Evil is a test, and the test makes us stronger. You know the latter as “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” The problem, of course, is that evil does kill. How are the bombing victims of Dresden and Hiroshima stronger?
Are we to accept evil perpetrated on individuals because the survivors and the unaffected generally become stronger? What are a few tens of thousands of deaths compared to making the rest of us stronger. Huh! I guess we learn their lesson. Had the people of Pinellas County suffered, I guess I would have learned a lesson. That surviving the test stuff isn’t much of a consolation, and it isn’t even necessarily a lesson. What have the people who deny the Holocaust learned? How has the Holocaust made them stronger?
If I step on an ant, the colony continues as usual. Bad times for the squashed ant, but relatively insignificant for the colony. The Queen will lay another egg. Even if recognized at the time, the evil is soon forgotten or, if not forgotten, diminished in significance. Are you thinking of Tamerlane and the pyramid made of skulls right now? Is Caligula on your mind? Are you stronger because he existed as evil incarnate?
Evil is an abstraction when it’s not personal. And if there were degrees of abstraction, then mass killings are higher degrees of evil, incomprehensible for individuals. Say you live in Montreal but you read of a successful poisoning of Pinellas County’s water supply and the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands. Now what? Can it happen to you? Does evil spread to a would-be Canadian mass killer, a Canadian poisoner?
When the COVID-19 virus first spread, did you cautiously approach your mail, a public doorknob, a store package? What do you think happened to Tylenol bottles all over the Northern Hemisphere in 1982? Do you think people went on taking Tylenol as usual? Do you think that the people of Pinellas County will switch to bottled water for a while? Will they wash their fruits and vegetables under the tap? And even though lye has long been used in the making of soaps, do you think they’ll enter the shower with confidence?
Maybe the expression should be, “if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you painfully and neurotically aware that you might be killed, that you might be the next innocent victim of anonymous evil as imposed by man or virus.” But even in your fear, you won’t have an answer for the question of evil. You will be like Job and like every other victim of evil, wondering about its source and its seemingly perpetual existence and ubiquity.
In an age of statistics, one could reason that an incident like Job’s losing his wealth and family or someone’s dying from poisoned Tylenol is inevitable. The numbers lend themselves to such incidents we term evil. “What are the chances?” we ask. “With so many people alive and living in all kinds of environments from crowded cities to mountainside hermitages, something we term evil is inevitable.” And we comfort ourselves in the shelter of numbers. “Sure,” we argue, “there are poisonings and bombings elsewhere, but there are so many people living in so many places, that my chances of being a victim are relatively low. Statistically, I’m safe though statistically someone else isn’t. Some people die from the virus; others survive; some people pick up the poison Tylenol bottle; some people pick up normal bottle. You know, ‘what doesn’t kill you,’ as they say.”
But considering evil statistically doesn’t account for its source or existence. What was Job supposed to say, “Well if it had to happen to someone, it might as well have been me.” Small consolation for victims. When is the last time you considered yourself just a statistic? When is the last time you said, “Oh! Woe is me, but I understand it was my turn to succumb to evil”?
That payback for evil has generated more evil is undeniable. The mutually assured destruction principle might play out someday. Nuclear weapons will be the effective medium that spreads evil like floodwaters over the continents. Will those who survive say, “I certainly learned a lesson, and I’m stronger for it”? Or will they scratch their irradiated heads and ask, “Now just why did God create the Leviathan?”
Should we adopt a humanist, Zoroastrian, Judeo-Christian, Islamic, Hindi, Buddhist, or some other explanation for evil’s obvious presence among us? Who has the explanation?
And why should I ask you that question? Is there a trigger, an incident behind the question? Yes, in Pinellas County, Florida, someone hacked into the water supplier’s computer and tried to inject lye into the water at 100 times the recommended proportion. To what end? Certainly, it wasn’t for Good. Undeniably it was for Evil. There’s no relativism here, no situation ethics that can justify poisoning thousands. At least not in the mind of a so-called normal and rational person.
What motivates someone to attempt mass killing? Who poisons indiscriminately? “Nothing new,” you say, “it was a practice long ago when people contaminated wells of their conquered enemies. And remember the reason that all bottles and packages have not only those seals, but also warnings that if the seals are broken, the user should not use the product? That stemmed from the Tylenol cyanide poisoning incident of 1982.”
Thousands of years of contemplating the nature of evil have not produced a satisfactory answer. William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, a novel on the reading list in many high schools, suggests that evil, or savagery, is inherent. It’s built into the human framework. Jane Goodall’s discovery of chimps attacking neighboring chimps suggests the inherent evil is inherited. Religions everywhere seek an answer. The Book of Job places evil’s origin in The Adversary, the Satan, making it external to humanity. But seeking an external source has never been an explanation that satisfies. Even in the biblical tale, Job gets only an evasive answer: “Were you there when I created the Leviathan?” What’s the implication? What can Job or any of us infer from that answer? That the presence of evil is beyond our comprehension?
Did the Roman god Vulcan unleash pyroclastic flows down the slopes of Vesuvius in 79 AD? Do Zeus and Thor throw lightning at golfers idly standing under a tree during a storm? Is evil imposed from without as retribution for some previous offense, possibly an act that is in its own nature a perpetrated evil? If the answer is affirmative, then the implication is punishment, but no apology, no mea culpa, sets things right. Job lost his wealth and kids. Eurydice stays in Hades. If there had been deaths in Pinellas County as there were in the Tylenol tampering, no one could return the dead to the living. The mark of evil is most often a permanent tattoo, a tombstone at the worst and a psychological scar at the least.
But when I ask myself about the motivation for an attempted mass killing of Pinellas County’s residents, I must also ask whether or not I accept the bombing of London, Pearl Harbor, Dresden, or Hiroshima as justifiable mass killings. Was evil not at work? Were the innocent Londoners, sailors, Dresden or Hiroshima residents deserving of indiscriminate or targeted bombing? Isn’t it foolish to ask whether or not they deserved what they received? What had they done on a scale equal to total annihilation? What did Job do? What did the people of Pinellas County do that motivated someone to attempt killing them? Do I answer by saying war on the many is a justifiable revenge for evil perpetrated by a few power-hungry leaders?
The hacker who sought to poison the water was probably some disgruntled person who lost his Pinellas County or Clearwater city job, right? Clearwater?
No one, even the primary suspect, has been convicted of the Tylenol cyanide poisonings though that suspect was imprisoned for extortion. But whom do we hold accountable for the mass bombings of WWII? Truman? Isn’t the argument that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved millions of casualties for the price of a few hundred thousand deaths? Didn’t the bombing of Dresden shorten the war in Europe? Was it just a matter of a backward technology? There were no smart bombs to limit collateral damage. What choice did the Allies have in dealing with an evil leader and his willing followers? You bomb London; we bomb Dresden. It’s that mutual destruction idea by which we still operate.
Would I have done any differently if I had been President instead of Truman? Would you? Neither of us would indiscriminately poison a county’s water supply, we say, so we’re not evil; neither of us is a medium through which evil passes to others. “But, Pearl Harbor and the Rape of Nanking? You were asking for it, Japan; you were asking for it, Hiroshima,” we might have said.
Brilliant and one-time rakish Augustine of Hippo was a follower of Zarathustra early on, but then as a converted Christian and Neoplatonist, he reasoned that he couldn’t accept the principle of a god of evil AND a god of good, basically, because he believed in an Infinite God and could not accept that there could be two infinite beings, one good and the other evil. Yet, he appears to have accepted the existence of The Adversary in what I would call the Jobian sense, that is, an Evil One who spreads evil with the permission of God. But that just runs us round the circle. Why would a “good” God allow evil? The typical answer is twofold: Evil is a test, and the test makes us stronger. You know the latter as “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” The problem, of course, is that evil does kill. How are the bombing victims of Dresden and Hiroshima stronger?
Are we to accept evil perpetrated on individuals because the survivors and the unaffected generally become stronger? What are a few tens of thousands of deaths compared to making the rest of us stronger. Huh! I guess we learn their lesson. Had the people of Pinellas County suffered, I guess I would have learned a lesson. That surviving the test stuff isn’t much of a consolation, and it isn’t even necessarily a lesson. What have the people who deny the Holocaust learned? How has the Holocaust made them stronger?
If I step on an ant, the colony continues as usual. Bad times for the squashed ant, but relatively insignificant for the colony. The Queen will lay another egg. Even if recognized at the time, the evil is soon forgotten or, if not forgotten, diminished in significance. Are you thinking of Tamerlane and the pyramid made of skulls right now? Is Caligula on your mind? Are you stronger because he existed as evil incarnate?
Evil is an abstraction when it’s not personal. And if there were degrees of abstraction, then mass killings are higher degrees of evil, incomprehensible for individuals. Say you live in Montreal but you read of a successful poisoning of Pinellas County’s water supply and the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands. Now what? Can it happen to you? Does evil spread to a would-be Canadian mass killer, a Canadian poisoner?
When the COVID-19 virus first spread, did you cautiously approach your mail, a public doorknob, a store package? What do you think happened to Tylenol bottles all over the Northern Hemisphere in 1982? Do you think people went on taking Tylenol as usual? Do you think that the people of Pinellas County will switch to bottled water for a while? Will they wash their fruits and vegetables under the tap? And even though lye has long been used in the making of soaps, do you think they’ll enter the shower with confidence?
Maybe the expression should be, “if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you painfully and neurotically aware that you might be killed, that you might be the next innocent victim of anonymous evil as imposed by man or virus.” But even in your fear, you won’t have an answer for the question of evil. You will be like Job and like every other victim of evil, wondering about its source and its seemingly perpetual existence and ubiquity.
In an age of statistics, one could reason that an incident like Job’s losing his wealth and family or someone’s dying from poisoned Tylenol is inevitable. The numbers lend themselves to such incidents we term evil. “What are the chances?” we ask. “With so many people alive and living in all kinds of environments from crowded cities to mountainside hermitages, something we term evil is inevitable.” And we comfort ourselves in the shelter of numbers. “Sure,” we argue, “there are poisonings and bombings elsewhere, but there are so many people living in so many places, that my chances of being a victim are relatively low. Statistically, I’m safe though statistically someone else isn’t. Some people die from the virus; others survive; some people pick up the poison Tylenol bottle; some people pick up normal bottle. You know, ‘what doesn’t kill you,’ as they say.”
But considering evil statistically doesn’t account for its source or existence. What was Job supposed to say, “Well if it had to happen to someone, it might as well have been me.” Small consolation for victims. When is the last time you considered yourself just a statistic? When is the last time you said, “Oh! Woe is me, but I understand it was my turn to succumb to evil”?
That payback for evil has generated more evil is undeniable. The mutually assured destruction principle might play out someday. Nuclear weapons will be the effective medium that spreads evil like floodwaters over the continents. Will those who survive say, “I certainly learned a lesson, and I’m stronger for it”? Or will they scratch their irradiated heads and ask, “Now just why did God create the Leviathan?”
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